Across the globe, public services face mounting pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. Fiscal constraints, workforce shortages, and rising citizen expectations have made productivity a defining challenge for governments everywhere.
Recognising this, the AICPA and CIMA developed the Public Sector Productivity Toolkit — a practical resource designed to help public service professionals and finance leaders measure, manage, and improve productivity in ways that create real public value.
What the toolkit offers
The toolkit brings together insights from research, practitioner interviews, and management accounting practice to provide frameworks, checklists, and practical tools that help finance leaders link resources to outcomes.
It offers:
- A clear model for defining productivity — connecting inputs, outputs, and outcomes.
- Guidance on how finance, HR, and operations can work together to track outcomes-based performance.
- Tools to assess organisational culture and leadership readiness for productivity reform.
- Case studies and examples of digital innovation, cross-department collaboration, and business partnering in action.
The toolkit’s value lies not in its scope, however, but in its practicality. It enables leaders to turn broad goals into specific actions. This article explores three top actions finance leaders can take to improve public sector productivity: how to define productivity clearly, how to enable finance to lead change, and how to build the culture that sustains it.
Define productivity clearly and anchor it in outcomes
One of the biggest barriers to improving productivity is the lack of a shared definition. Many organisations still measure activity — what gets done — rather than results. True productivity comes from understanding how your work creates outcomes that matter to citizens.
To do this, start by clarifying three things in your organisation:
- Inputs: What resources (people, funding, data, or technology) make your work possible?
- Outputs: What services or products are produced with those resources?
- Outcomes: What changes or benefits do those services create for the public?
Once these distinctions are clear, build a “line of sight” that connects day-to-day activities with long-term outcomes. Finance leaders can facilitate this by working with departmental heads to ensure performance measures reflect impact, not just effort.
Actions finance leaders can take:
- Map how your team’s work contributes to wider organisational outcomes. Start with one service area and expand.
- Challenge whether existing KPIs measure outputs (activity) or outcomes (results).
- Build dashboards or balanced scorecards that visualise how resources flow through to citizen outcomes.
- Use management accounting techniques, such as variance analysis or performance benchmarking, to link costs to outcomes and identify what delivers the greatest value.
When outcomes are clearly defined, productivity conversations shift from “What did we spend?” to “What did we achieve?”. This represents a fundamental mindset change for sustainable public sector outcomes-based performance.
Enable finance to lead change — not just report on it
Finance has a unique vantage point across the organisation, connecting people, processes, and performance. Yet in many public bodies, finance remains the productivity reporter, not its driver.
To change this, finance leaders should position their teams as business partners — helping decision-makers interpret data, understand value, and act on insights. This means moving:
- From control to collaboration — working alongside HR, operations, and policy teams.
- From reporting to insight — using data to identify performance trends and interventions.
- From cost to value — framing discussions around outcomes achieved per currency unit spent.
CFOs and other finance leaders are the connectors who can turn strategic ambition into operational reality. They are the ones best placed to ask: Are we investing resources in areas that deliver the greatest public value?
Actions finance leaders can take:
- Identify one major programme or service and create a cross-functional group (finance, HR, or operations) to analyse productivity drivers.
- Build shared dashboards that combine financial and nonfinancial metrics, such as service quality, staff engagement, or citizen satisfaction.
- Integrate productivity conversations into budgeting and planning cycles so improvement becomes continuous, not episodic.
- Equip your finance team with storytelling skills to communicate insight, not just numbers.
When finance steps into this enabling role, it transforms from being the “guardian of spend” to the catalyst for better outcomes, ensuring public money delivers measurable, lasting value.
Build the culture that sustains productivity
No productivity framework succeeds without the right culture behind it. Data, processes, and systems can guide decisions, but culture determines whether people act on them.
Finance leaders have a key role in shaping this environment. Productivity thrives where clarity of purpose, trust between teams, and accountability for delivery exist. Leaders set the tone by modelling transparency, encouraging collaboration, and linking individual effort to collective success.
Actions finance leaders can take:
- Start every team meeting by connecting current work to organisational outcomes, reinforcing the “why”.
- Encourage managers to discuss barriers to productivity openly and focus on solutions, not blame.
- Integrate productivity goals into personal development and appraisal processes so improvement becomes everyone’s responsibility.
- Create “learning loops” — moments to reflect, review data, and celebrate what’s working.
Strong leadership creates alignment and momentum. When people understand the purpose behind their work and see their contribution to wider outcomes, productivity follows naturally.
From measurement to momentum
Public sector productivity is not about doing more with less; it’s about creating more value from what we already have. Defining outcomes, enabling finance to lead change, and fostering the right culture are three levers every finance leader can pull immediately.
For those wanting to go further, the AICPA & CIMA Public Sector Productivity Toolkit offers additional tools — from leadership frameworks to cultural readiness checklists and outcome-mapping templates — to help you embed these practices across your organisation.
You can access the full toolkit on the AICPA & CIMA website.
Arianna De Angelis is an advocacy specialist at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.